Special Guest Blogger: Grigoriy Nelyubov

Since time immemorial there have been stars that have flown so high only to come crashing down to earth with all the grace of an American at a free buffet and i was literally an ace away from being one of the first few men who flew the highest because i was a Russian Cosmonaut at the time of when the Soviets were spanking the American's in the Space Race.
We had sent the first animal into orbit and the first human's in space in Vostok 1 and Vostok 2 and i was all set to pilot Vostok 3 until i had a problem with a drink, or rather the dozen of them i had drunk when returning from a weekend pass when i got into an altercation with an army patrol at a train station checkpoint and punched one of the guards.
I was a captain and pilot in the Soviet Air Force and while the Americans sought mature test pilots for their first spaceflights, the Soviets recruited young pilots with the intent of training them for a career as spacemen and out of 3,000 applicants, i was picked as one of the original 20 Cosmonauts for the Soviet Space missions and after all the tests and exams, it was Yuri Gagarin, Gherman Titov and me who were chosen to ride the first manned missions in that order.
Now the Soviet missions were very much seat of the pants stuff, the best most of us guys hoped for was a merciful, quick death and on the launch of Vostok 1 three press releases were prepared, one for success, two for failures but when Yuri circled the Earth in 1961, global housewives stopped a-cleanin’, dogs sat up in their basket, birds stopped a-twitterin’ and cow-milkin’-device-type-things stopped…cow milking and he came back safely to be a hero not just in the USSR but Worldwide.  
A few months later Titov went up and came down again a day later with the first photograph's of Earth from space and then it was to be my turn and a planned 3 day mission circling our Planet...until that train station incident and i was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct.
The duty officer agreed to ignore the whole incident and not send the report if i apologised, but i got all 'Do You Know Who I Am?' which couldn't really be taken as an apology but i thought they won't kick me out, i'm off to the stars soon and even when they reported me to the authorities i was confident they would dismiss it but the only thing dismissed was me from the Cosmonaut corps.
I went back to flying planes while my former comrades blasted toward the stars and my own nation airbrushed me out of ever being part of Soviet Space history but missing out on global fame led me to drink heavily which is how i ended up wandering around drunk one morning and straight into the path of a speeding train, wiping me from history permanently.